WHOSE BIBLE IS IT?

Many authors who write about the Bible are so tendentious that their books are worthless; other writers are thoughtful and well-meaning but nonetheless argue as much from faith as from evidence. Which is why any syllabus of religion reading should begin with a book that teaches humility, reminding us how difficult it is even for the faithful to get at God's words. After all, God is perfect, but translators and scribes are not. One such book is Whose Bible Is It ?, a new history of how the Bible was written, redacted and translated into its present editions, written by the esteemed church historian Jaroslav Pelikan.

The book is far from perfect, but fortunately Pelikan is at his best where most readers will be at their worst: in antiquity. He begins with lucid, succinct explanations of the Hebrew Bible's translation into its first Greek edition, known as the Septuagint, then into Jerome's Latin version, the Vulgate. A fluent reader of Hebrew, Greek and Latin (and, for what it's worth, German, Italian, French, Russian, Slavonic and Czech), Pelikan is good at unsettling our notions of what the Bible really says. By the end of the 4th century, there were competing Hebrew, Latin and Greek versions of every major book of the Bible, and almost nobody could read them all and compare. Few Greeks would know, as Pelikan does, that what they read as "They have pierced my hands and feet," a line from the 22nd psalm that Jesus cries on the cross in the New Testament, was originally rendered by Hebrew scribes as "Like lions [they maul] my hands and feet" -- which, lacking the "piercing," seems much less like an Old Testament foreshadowing of the crucifixion...more here